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Series: VidBITS

We periodically hold staff roundtables to discuss some important topic of the day, or just something that's been weighing on us. You can watch us on YouTube or download the audio to listen while driving or working out.

Is App.net aimed at killing Twitter? No, and luckily, Glenn Fleishman was able to explain just what is behind the new real-time social feed system in this TidBITS staff meeting held live via Google Hangouts On Air. We hope to publish an article about App.net soon, since it’s a fascinating effort to provide a system of pipes that independent developers can use for any imaginable purpose, rather than a platform that the company controls for its own benefit. Other upcoming article topics discussed include group photo sharing sites to replace the late, lamented ZangZing and Notification Center, whose excessive reminders remind us of nothing so much as overenthusiastic PR reps.

We’ve been recording many of our weekly staff meetings via Google Hangouts On Air (see my YouTube page for links), and although these are very much less formal and focused than our TidBITS Presents events, they’re on par with a weekly video podcast talking about what’s happening in the Apple world. In essence, we have to have a staff meeting each week to talk about what we’re going to write about, and you’re welcome to sit in on it or watch later. If only someone would bring donuts!

Watch the latest TidBITS staff roundtable to get our take on the role of technology in election coverage, how likely it is that Apple will switch away from Intel-based CPUs in Macs, and the products we’re investigating right now.Show full article

The U.S. presidential election has come and gone, and in this half-hour TidBITS staff roundtable, we discuss how we watched the results roll in, and what changes we saw in how technology has changed election coverage. For a number of us, that meant watching Web sites with election maps updating in real time, while simultaneously comparing the results against the state-by-state predictions from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times. Silver is a quant who has applied serious number crunching to the historical and polling data surrounding the election, and while the media was calling the election a
“tossup,” his numbers had long been pointing at an Obama win in the Electoral College. Silver isn’t alone in this field, and while the Romney camp undoubtedly had analysts too, there’s a fascinating article at Time that looks at how President Obama’s quants helped direct his campaign.

Next, we talked through the latest news about Apple potentially dropping Intel chips in Macs in favor of custom ARM-based chips along the lines of the A6X used in the fourth-generation iPad. The staff consensus is that it would be totally in character for Apple to switch to their own custom chips. We strongly suspect that Apple is compiling Mac OS X for ARM-based chips even now, much as the company did with Intel-based chips while shipping for PowerPC chips. It seems likely that Bob Mansfield, now heading up a new Technologies group at Apple that includes the semiconductor division, would be evaluating the feasibility of such a
switch over the next few years. The big question in such a scenario is what would happen with virtualization.

Lastly, here are the products we’re looking into for reviews or other coverage:

The Matias Quiet Pro keyboard doesn’t have quite the feel of the Tactile Pro, but Adam has found that it’s a whole lot quieter for those who don’t want their typing to be a public event.

READERS LIKE YOU! Support TidBITS by becoming a member today!Check out the perks at <http://tidbits.com/member_benefits.html>Special thanks to Ben Thomas, Jerry White, Fritz Brunner, and Weldon
Dodd for their generous support!

iTunes 11 continues to occupy our thoughts, largely thanks to all the comments and email that we continue to get about it, so we devoted a lot of this 45-minute staff roundtable to discussing just why iTunes 11 is so important. Michael Cohen hit the nail on the head with his comment that iTunes 11 is actually a sort of meta-operating system, and how that makes it fertile ground for user interface experimentation (and mistakes!). Matt Neuburg pointed out that iTunes 11 is nearly identical in interface to the new Remote app for iOS, leading to some argument about whether Apple is pushing all interfaces to be more like iOS. Other issues that came up include problems being encountered
by classical music buffs, the Command-1 and Command-L tricks for getting back to Music from wherever you might be, how to sort the Albums view with View Options, and the continued lack of any coherent approach for sharing a single set of music within a family.

Next, responding to a number of recent reports about the differing accuracy of antivirus apps, Rich Mogull educated us about the techniques that different apps use to identify viruses and why they do better or worse at identifying viruses. This still isn’t as big a deal on the Mac as on Windows, where Rich said there are, by some counts, 65,000 new virus variants appearing every day. But most interesting were Rich’s insights into the murky world of cybercrime, where companies offer virus-creation toolkits with 24-by-7 support and sites where new viruses can be tested against all existing antivirus programs before being released. Rich also shared his experiences infiltrating this world with a fake identity that applied for a job as a
“money mule,” culminating in a phone call to his recruiter while on stage at the DEF CON security conference.

Though there are a few visual jokes in the video, you won’t miss anything important if you instead listen to the audio-only version, which you can do by clicking the Listen link above, or by subscribing to the TidBITS podcast to listen during your commute or workout.

On the one hand, given how magical the iPhone and iPad remain, it almost seems ungrateful to cavil about problems in iOS 6 that we’d like to see Apple address, but on the other, we’re as much Apple’s customers as anyone else, and probably more so than most. And so, constructive criticism is the goal of this 45-minute staff roundtable in which we run through a number of suggestions for ways that Apple could improve iOS for our everyday use, if only they’d listen to feedback (which Matt Neuburg equates, memorably, to the lack of feedback in the toilet industry). A lot of the suggestions fall under the general rubric of making iOS more flexible and acknowledging the fact that
some people really do have more significant needs than others, something that Apple seems to have lost track of while focusing on the lowest-common-denominator market. The discussion hit the following main points:

Centralized file system. Apple has long avoided allowing iOS apps to access any sort of central file storage area, forcing each app to maintain separate copies of its documents and relying on the clumsy Open In system for copying documents between apps. Increasingly, Dropbox has become the de facto file system for iOS, with numerous apps integrating support. If Apple wanted to regain control over this space from Dropbox and move away from the per-app file storage approach, we could imagine an iCloud-based service that goes beyond the traditional folder-based filesystem by automatically scanning files for malicious code, presenting only appropriate file types to different apps, and generally updating the conceptual model that we use
to think about documents.

Open Siri up to other apps. As we’ve become more accustomed to using Siri, the technology’s limitations become increasingly obvious. Most notably, why can’t we use Siri to work in apps other than Apple’s? Apple could allow iOS apps to register a Siri dictionary of sorts, in much the same way a Mac app can have an AppleScript dictionary, that would lay out what phrases Siri would recognize and what actions those phrases would trigger. We’d also like to see Siri gain some alternative voices.

Extend the home screen. The iOS home screen — technically known as the Springboard — is completely broken. It’s nearly impossible to find any apps after the first screen or two, and many of us have fallen back on Spotlight and Siri to open apps. Worse, unlike Android and Windows Phone, iOS can only display app icons on the home screen, which seems downright quaint in a world where information rules. There’s a site displaying Android home screens that puts iOS to shame, given how gorgeous and useful these screens look. Apple needs to make some serious strides in this area, if iOS is to continue to compete against the alternatives.

Fix the bugs! From what we can tell, iOS 6 is the buggiest version of iOS yet. Matt explains one of the low-level bugs he’s run into, and notes that he has reported more bugs against iOS 6 than all other versions of iOS combined. Our theory is that the problems stem from a lack of communication within teams at Apple, and the hope is that the shakeup that ousted Scott Forstall might improve internal communication. But even still, we’d like to see more resources devoted to testing.

Give us a look under the hood. There’s no question that Apple has done, and should continue to do, a good job of hiding complexity in iOS. But that has come at the cost of technical transparency for those of us who both want more detail and aren’t offended by complexity. For instance, we’d like to be able to find out exactly what is taking space in that “Other” category (which often seems unreasonably large), we’d like to have an Activity Monitor-like app that would show which apps were using a lot of CPU or battery power, we’d like more feedback about and control over the Wi-Fi networks to which we connect, and we desperately want to be able to find out exactly which individual apps are consuming cellular bandwidth
(Apple has once again removed DataMan Pro from the App Store — see “Track Per-App Data Usage in iOS with DataMan Pro,” 20 November 2012). We’re fully aware that this goes against Apple’s grain, but hey, as long as we’re wishing for things that would make our iOS lives better, more visibility into the workings would certainly do so.

More-granular parental controls. Apple acknowledges that parents might want some control over how their children use iOS devices, but iOS’s current parental controls aren’t nearly focused enough to be useful. We’d like to see the capability to restrict particular apps by time (no game playing after bedtime) and by overall usage amount (no more than 30 minutes of a particular game per day). Plus, it would be nice to be able to eliminate the possibility of cellular data overuse.

A more-coherent approach for Settings. It has become increasingly difficult to find any given setting in the Settings app, particularly on the iPhone, because there are so many, and if you return to the Settings app from another app, it’s difficult to figure out where you are.

A unified approach to alarms and reminders. With iMessage and iCloud-synced reminders, we’re all being inundated with notifications on multiple devices, with very little acknowledgment that if you’ve seen an alarm on one device, you don’t need to see it on all the others. iMessage even does a little of this, but Apple needs to extend iCloud’s awareness of what device is currently in use appropriately so we aren’t just being nagged non-stop.

Though it may be easier to figure out who is talking by watching the video, you won’t miss anything important if you instead listen to the audio-only version, which you can do by clicking the Listen link above, or by subscribing to the TidBITS podcast to listen during your commute or workout.

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Watch (or listen) to the latest TidBITS staff roundtable for our thoughts on just why Apple has engendered such loyalty in the past, and continues to do so in today’s very different world.Show full article

As Valentine’s Day approached last week, our thoughts turned to thoughts of love. Have you ever ended up in a love-hate relationship? Or rather, “I love what you’ve done for me over the years, but a lot what you’re doing now irritates the stuffing out of me”? That’s how many of us feel about Apple these days, because, let’s face it, we have a long history of using, supporting, and evangelizing Apple products, from early Macs to the latest iPads. But despite the way Apple’s marketing always talks directly to us, it’s pretty clear that Apple doesn’t really care what any given customer thinks.

In this week’s staff roundtable we discuss just why it is that Apple engendered such loyalty back in the day, and why that support continues despite Apple — and the entire technology industry — changing in fundamental ways. The two key insights:

Apple’s ascendance is a bit like having your political party win in a landslide election. You’ve always supported and evangelized them because you like what they stand for, and after they win, you’re ecstatic for a while. But then you realize that in large part, it will be politics as usual, and all those changes you hoped for when your party wasn’t in power still aren’t going to happen. Despite your disappointment, you can’t go back on your voting recommendations to family and friends, because that would be admitting you were wrong all along, and, more practically, it’s still better than the alternative.

One of Kurt Vonnegut’s most enduring concepts is that of the “granfalloon,” which he defines as “a proud and meaningless association of human beings.” Whether or not there’s any actual meaning in the association of those who identify as Apple aficionados, we humans do have a drive to belong. In Apple’s early days, that drive was bolstered by a desire to find others who were in the minority of being Mac users; nowadays, the drive to belong is probably driven more by wanting to be part of the winning team.

Anyway, I don’t think anything was decided in our discussion (or even if there was anything that could have been decided), but if you’ve been pondering your own association with the ecosystem that has grown up around Apple, watch or listen to the roundtable and perhaps it will help you solidify your thoughts.